This paper studies the dynamics of durable and nondurable consumption under two alternative assumptions about information updating by households – rational inattention and sticky expectations. We first show that the two types of sticky information diffusion can help generate strong excess...

Loan guarantees are arguably the most widely used policy intervention in credit markets, especially for consumers. This may be natural, as they have several features that, a priori, suggest that they might be particularly effective in improving allocations. However, despite this, little is...

How might society ensure the allocation of credit to those who lack meaningful collateral? Two very different options that have each been pursued by a variety of societies through time and space are (i) relatively harsh penalties for default and, more recently, (ii) loan guarantee programs that...

Over the past three decades six striking features of aggregates in the unsecured credit market have been documented: (1) rising personal bankruptcy rates, (2) rising dispersion in unsecured interest rates across borrowing households, (3) the emergence of a discount for borrowers with good credit...

This paper studies the aggregate dynamics of durable and nondurable consumption under sticky information diffusion (SID) due to noisy observations and slow learning within the permanent income framework. We show that SID can significantly improve the model's predictions on the joint behavior of...

In this paper we examine how model uncertainty due to the preference for robustness (RB) affects optimal taxation and the evolution of debt in the Barro tax-smoothing model (1979). We first study how the government spending shocks are absorbed in the short run by varying taxes or through debt...

In this paper we examine the effects of model misspecification (robustness or RB) on international consumption correlations in two otherwise standard small open economy models: one with perfect state observation and the other with imperfect state observation. We show that in the presence of...

We document that the interest rate response to fiscal stimulus (IRRF) is lower in countries with high inequality or high household debt. To interpret this evidence we develop a model in which households take on debt to maintain a consumption threshold (saving constraint). Now debt-burdened,...

We document four features of consumption and income microdata: (1) household-level consumption is as volatile as household income on average, (2) household-level consumption has a positive but small correlation with income, (3) many low-wealth households have marginal propensities to consume...

This paper introduces the rational inattention hypothesis (RI) -- that agents process information subject to finite channel constraints -- into a stochastic growth model with permanent technology shocks. We find that RI raises consumption volatility relative to output by introducing an...